Development of Information Access technologies based on techniques of Information Retrieval, Natural Language Processing, and Database Management becomes increasingly more important for many applications, (e.g., providing effective access to Web resources and text archives, and analyzing big data obtained from various kinds of sensors). It is indispensable for developing such technologies to experimentally evaluate them by using test collections constructed under collaborations of many researchers. Over the 15 years, NTCIR has been formulating the infrastructure for the evaluation, and contributing to development of the Information Access technologies. A total of 70 "evaluation tasks" have been organized, attracting over 880 participant research groups worldwide so far. Furthermore, over 3,700 research groups have signed up to use the NTCIR test collections in their research. Consequently, NTCIR has been the major forum for researchers to intensively discuss the evaluation methodology of emerging information access technologies.
As the details have been finalized for NTCIR-13, we would like to hold an event to introduce the NTCIR-13 and exciting new evaluation tasks. Are you young researchers in Information Access area, faculty members, researchers in industry, or simply interested in Informatics? Anyone is welcome for the event! Join us to share the advance of the state of the art Information Access research and development!

Fees: Free
*Pre-registration is not required, but, for preparing, if you would like
to participate in the Kick-Off Event, please e-mail to NTCIR Project Office
at ntc-secretariat
with subject: [NTCIR-13KickOff].